I-COM is pleased to announce that Yasaman Hadjibashi [pictured], Chief Data Officer at Barclays Africa Group in South Africa, is joining the I-COM Global Board.

Yasaman Hadjibashi’s roots in banking started at Wells Fargo in California, where she worked during her time as an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. After episodes at PwC and Deutsche Bank in USA, she completed her MBA from Harvard Business School upon which she joined Barclays in 2010 in London having worked in senior management positions in product innovation and execution across digital and mobile, as well as in client/customer experience and design.

After helping build Barclays Bank's Group Data function together with Dr. Usama Fayyad throughout 2014, she was appointed as the first Chief Data Officer of Barclays Africa Group in February 2015 with a base in Johannesburg, where she defined and has since been leading the bank's data transformation across the continent creating a portfolio of award-winning and intelligent customer-centric data products (winner of the 2016 I-COM Data Creativity Awards for the Emerging Markets and General category as well as finalists at the 2016 Cloudera Data Impact Awards) that represent her deep focus on transitioning the banking experiences to predictive and personalised ones.

As part of this exciting effort, she has also launched Africa’s first ever fully AI-enabled banking chatbot within Facebook Messenger that connects with new millennial customers on a range of product and service information via friendly and natural conversation. She is in the midst of externally open-sourcing Barclays Pronto, an unstructured social media analytics platform, as the first open-sourced application for the bank globally to encourage external contributions towards the bank's business objectives. In addition, her humanitarian passion for strong macro-societal impact and innovation has led her to launch 'Africa Success' (www.africasuccess.org), an initiative focused on creating a replicable global framework that could engineer motivation and drive in young individuals through latest mobile technologies and channels using big data and artificial intelligence. More...